In my last post I mentioned the 6 milestones Outskirts Press has identified in the course of migrating our web presence to RWD (responsive web design, which I defined previously). Those milestones are:
- Landings Pages
- Email Communication
- Newsletters
- Author Webpages
- Outskirts Press External
- Outskirts Press Internal
Let’s talk about the first milestone, landing pages, which is a milestone we have already met. Outskirts Press does a fair amount of search engine marketing, and when someone clicks on one of those SEM links, they arrive on a “landing page” which is designed to educate the author about our self-publishing services. We have different landing pages based upon the advertising we are doing. If someone is interested in publishing a children’s book with us, for example, they arrive upon a different landing page than if they’re interested in writing a thriller, or a self-help book. We’ve gone through a number of landing pages over the years, and up until the RWD-redesigns, the last landing pages had been with us for a long time.
So it was time for new landing pages anyway. Like any RWD redesign, the trick is to make the page look great regardless of whether you are looking at it on a wide-screen monitor or a smartphone in portrait orientation. Add to that the multiple objectives of a landing page in general, which is to acknowledge the wording of the SEM advertisement, inform the client of our available services, and motivate them to either contact us or provide their contact information, usually through the use of a free whitepaper or e-book or some other giveaway.
Since updating our landing pages to RWD, our engagement rate on those pages has improved by 50%. I’d say it was a milestone worth reaching. Next time we’ll talk about the Email Communication milestone. In the meantime, here are screen shots of the new landing page on two different devices, so you can see how they look the same, and yet different, based upon the device being used by our clients.
President of Outskirts Press 